Recipes for cooking or baking are among the most popular types of digital content available online. This type of content directly affects a user's lifestyle, well-being, health, budget, and many more aspects of their daily lives. Consumers use recipes to make informed decisions about their lives, what they eat and purchase.
Recipes are usually written in a very concise, succinct manner. They do, however, contain implied information (also referred as “nutritional and dietary information”), which may be used by the consumer to make informed decisions about the cooking process of the recipe.
Nutritional and dietary information of a recipe may refer to: the nutritional data for the final dish cooked according to the recipe (e.g. caloric value), various diets it complies with, how well it goes with other dishes, whether it has substitute dishes that would better fit the consumer's needs, whether it contains ingredients which are harmful to consumers with specific allergies, whether it is allowed for those with a certain medical condition (e.g. diabetes), or whether it fits a certain dietary ideology (e.g. Kosher, vegan etc.).
A plethora of recipes are available to consumers. Some websites provide consumers with nutritional information. However a user cannot receive nutritional information or processing for any of the user's own recipes that are not already in the website's database.
Further, the nutritional information provided by websites is typically displayed in the format found on food nutrition labels, and is not readily understood by most consumers. The user has to spend time and effort to calculate and understand nutritional information, taking into account the list of ingredients contained in a given recipe and their corresponding quantities. A common example is estimating the caloric value of a recipe. The average consumer would not know how many calories a recipe contains, especially if he wants to change the quantities to cook for a different number of people than suggested. He would spend a substantial amount of time in order to calculate this information.
Some existing websites provide electronic calculators that allow the consumer to calculate the caloric or nutritional data for variety of ingredients. However, these calculators focus on the ingredients and do not take into account the cooking methods, i.e. the caloric value of fried onion will be different than non-fired onion.
Lastly, recipes usually need to be modified by the consumer so that the recipe would fit his needs. These modifications could be changing the number of servings (the recipe's yield), switching an ingredient with another ingredient due to its availability or personal preference, converting the recipe from the US measuring system to the metric system and vice versa, creating a grocery list from the recipe, and so on.
In view of the above, consumers interested in the nutritional information related to a given recipe need to be equipped with an easy to use software tool to process and analyze a recipe and obtain complete nutritional and dietary information thereof, and to perform variety of modifications on a recipe according to their preferences. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method for allowing household and professional cooks, to perform the aforementioned tasks. The present invention relates to an automated analysis of a recipe, given in a natural language for computing nutritional and dietary information, such as caloric value, shopping list and other related information (called herein a “Recipe Analyzer”).
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become apparent through the description of the invention and the accompanying drawings that follow.